This invention relates generally to a computer-implemented method and a system for enabling investors and dealers to buy or sell secondary market debt securities, also known as bonds, from one another.
Conventionally, bond trading has been performed using three different methods. First, the vast majority (about 99.75%) of bond trading occurs with voice-based discovery and trading, also known as an auction system. With this approach, dealers and investors gather in one location to vocally offer and accept various prices and terms for different bonds. Multiple investors, typically institutional investors, can select a bid from competing dealers. This process suffers obvious disadvantages in that the number of investors and dealers that can be involved is limited. Additionally, a clerk must manually enter information regarding the trades after the fact, which is an error-prone procedure.
Second, a cross-matching system has been used, where anonymous buy and sell offers that are entered are matched by a broker. This approach has the disadvantage that the investors and dealers cannot choose to deal with a specific known party. For example, an investor may prefer to buy from a specific dealer who has successfully filled orders in the past, or where some other pre-established relationship has been developed. Similarly, a dealer may prefer to sell to specific investors, e.g., who have been credit-worthy. Moreover, such transactions are typically conducted by telephone, and thus are time consuming and inefficient.
Third, multiple single-dealer systems have been used, where an investor is required to execute an order with a specific dealer or dealers. However, this requires the investor to contact each dealer, typically by telephone, to determine what inventory and terms are being offered. This is also time consuming and inefficient. Moreover, the terms that are offered can change from minute to minute, and the latest information may not be offered to all investors on an equal basis.
Moreover, with the above approaches, access to new debt security issues by the investors is not uniform since, again, information is typically passed by a word of mouth.
In a related development, various computer-based systems have been developed for the buying and selling of equity securities, such as stocks. Many of these systems are targeted to the individual investor who accesses the system via an Internet web browser. Other systems, which are used by investment houses and serious individual investors such as day traders, use private networks to communicate with market makers, who are typically located at the trading floors of the major stock exchanges. Moreover, some private networks allow trading for individual dealers.
However, the above-mentioned systems do not provide a comprehensive solution for trading debt securities. Accordingly, there is a need for a computer-based method and system for the buying and selling of debt securities which addresses the above and other issues.